Original 'Ghostbusters' Outtakes Feature Alternate Titles For The Paranormal Exterminators

If the world hadn't gone to hell, we'd be about one month away from getting a new Ghostbusters movie from director Jason Reitman, son of the original film's director Ivan Reitman. But since Ghostbusters: Afterlife has been pushed back until March 2021, we'll have to settle for checking out some rarely seen footage from behind the scenes of the original Ghostbusters.

In the original movie from 1984, Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) and Egon Spenger (Harold Ramis) start up their own paranormal extermination and containment business from scratch. That includes creating a commercial to advertise their unique New York business, and some alternate takes and bloopers from the shooting of that commercial have been officially released online, and they include some alternate titles that were considered for the movie.

The first part of the outtakes features all three of the Ghostbusters standing together asking if people have had paranormal experiences that need to be dealt with. It's the end of this segment of the commercial where the alternate titles come into play, and here they do the entire segment but change the name of the business to both Ghoststoppers and Ghostblasters. The first one sounds awful, and it looks weird even in text. Ghostblasters could have worked, though it feels a little too aggressive. But Ghostbusters sounds just right.

The second segment of footage is a part of the commercial we don't see on screen in the movie. It has Ray informing the viewing public that their courteous and efficient staff is on call 24 hours a day to serve all their supernatural elimination needs. The first few takes only feature Ray, but there's a second wave where Annie Potts is brought in as the Ghostbusters receptionist Janine. You can see her rolling her eyes at Ray's promotion of their staff being on-call 24 hours a day, which especially sucks for her since she's their only staff member.

Finally, the last bit of footage has the three Ghostbusters back together for their slogan, "We're ready to believe you."

Even though this is the first time these alternate takes have been made available in full online, they're also available on last year's Steelbook release of Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters 2 on Blu-ray, which you can get right here. For your furhter enjoyment, here's the full commercial: